


Not with a bang but

by ybw



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 21:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1793437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ybw/pseuds/ybw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the apocalypse, there isn't much else an Avenger can do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not with a bang but

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



As it happens, the world ends on a Thursday. Steve doesn’t get the joke, but from the way Natasha laughs quietly about it, muttering “I never could get the hang of Thursdays,” he gathers that there is one.

That or the strain’s getting to her. It’s hard to tell, after.

Nobody else to ask.

~

Two days before the end of the world, one of Natasha’s scientist contacts drops a building on Steve. They’re in Kiev, still hunting down the Winter Soldier. (A ghost, Natasha called him once, but it wasn’t yet a joke. Steve’s chasing ghosts.)

He and Sam have been looking for this Professor King for weeks, sure that she can fill in the last gaps of what happened to Bucky. And as it happens, Professor King has been preparing for their visit.

It doesn’t go well.

Steve wakes up groggy a day and a half later, his arm pinned back together, and listens to Sam describing the PT he’ll have to go through. “Superman or not, don’t you think I won’t make you do them,” Sam warns him, and Steve waves him away, angry more at having lost their best lead than the injury.

(If he’d have known. If—)

~

Natasha bursts through the front doors of the Dobrobut Medical Centre the next afternoon, holding a knife in one hand, a map in the other, and carrying a bright pink backpack. The sight is so unexpected that Steve drops the candy bar he’s eating – scavenged from the empty break room, but he figures that the doctor who left it there isn’t in any position to care – and climbs out from behind the Reception desk so quickly that he bumps his head.

“Ow!” he yells, and Natasha’s knife is pointed in his direction before he can blink.

“Steve,” she gasps, and her voice comes out ragged, breaking apart at the seams. “Oh, god, Steve, you’re not-“

Whatever he isn’t, she doesn’t say before the knife disappears and Natasha wraps her arms around him. He can feel her shaking.

(“Don’t go reading anything into it,” Natasha tells him, later. “It was a very tense situation, and I hadn’t slept in two days.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Sure,” he says. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you looked worried about me for a second there.”

She doesn’t laugh.)

“Everybody’s gone,” he says, and that’s how the thought arranges itself in his head: like everyone else just went someplace else while he was sleeping, and they can wander back in from wherever they’ve been hiding any time. He’s been toying with the hospital’s computer equipment long enough to know that if this is a practical joke, however, it’s bigger than just Sam dragging a few nurses into the nearest bar to watch Steve panic. If Natasha’s here, and upset enough to let him see, it’s bigger than anything.

~

The first thing they need to do, Natasha explains, is set up a base of operations. “Protocol,” she adds.

Steve finds it reassuring, in a grim sort of way, that SHIELD agents have all been told what to do in the event of the sudden disappearance of almost all human life, and he follows her instructions without complaint.

“The hospital was a good choice,” she tells him approvingly, like he did anything more than wake up here. “If there are others out there, we might need to provide them with some assistance. And the electricity here should run on a back-up generator, which will buy us some time.”

“To do what?”

Natasha doesn’t answer straight away. She’s perched, ankles crossed, on the edge of a hospital bed, rummaging through Steve’s medical file. She hasn’t asked permission, but Steve knows her well enough to know that privacy is something for other people – besides, it’s not like he can read whatever the medical staff here have been writing about him.

“Huh, score one for Captain America,” she says. “You had surgery?”

Steve’s hand rises to touch the outside of his arm. The incision is still red, but healing. “I guess.”

“Could be a problem, if we need to remove the pins.” Natasha looks over the top of his file at him. “How do you feel about performing surgery on yourself?”

“I’ll pass.”

“Well, it’s not really my field,” Natasha allows. “Think if I screw it up your nose’ll buzz?” After a beat, she adds, “See, there’s this game-“

“Natasha.” She meets his gaze, unblinking, and gets to her feet. Up close, Natasha’s small in a way that she never usually looks, like she manages to bluff the rest of the world into making her seem twice the size and half as dangerous, and in spite of everything he can’t help but feel—

(If he’d have known. If he’d have known then—)

“To survive,” Natasha tells him, and the look on her face makes him think of old bones.

~

Having agreed to – whatever, from the hospital, Steve sets about rigging some radio equipment, trying to reach out to whoever else is still out there. Natasha looks over his work, suggesting a few more frequencies for SHIELD and other agencies besides, but there’s nobody talking, not even an automated distress call. Just dead air.

Natasha goes out into the town and brings back chicken, mushrooms, spices. She commandeers a few pots in the industrial kitchens and emerges an hour later with two plates of curry laced with hot chilli peppers and watery eyes.

“It’s not just us. It can’t just be us,” he says.

Natasha shrugs.

~

He finds Sam’s backpack underneath the chair next to his bed. Inside, he finds everything Sam had been carrying while he was out: a change of clothes for them both, Steve’s cell phone, a few euros, and the shield. He changes the clothes, thumbs through his contacts to try and find someone who can answer: Sam, the nurses at Peggy’s home, Stark Industries. Even Fury, who has the survival skills of one of those bacteria they sent into space, doesn’t answer.

When he’s done, he puts the phone away and pulls out the shield, and just holds it for a little while. His arm aches from the weight of it, but it’s a familiar sort of hurt, the kind that still makes sense, and it’s hard to care.

If Natasha sees him, she doesn’t say anything.

~

He wakes up before sunrise and heads into the main lobby. Natasha’s already there, dressed in someone’s borrowed clothes and fiddling with the computer. Steve settles down in the chair next to hers and watches her tap away at the keyboard, unable to follow what she’s doing until she makes a brief, irritated noise at the back of her throat and begins to translate.

Natasha isn’t acting like any version of herself she’s shown to Steve before. She narrates what she’s doing with as much feeling as if she were reading from the back of a cereal box, and doesn’t comment on his age once. (He’s seen her face down an alien invasion and still joke around. More than anything, that’s what tells him this is bad.)

Natasha’s fingers move over the keys as she explains the next stages in SHIELD’s protocol for the end of the world. “It’s a three-stage plan,” she explain. “Recon, that’s figure out what you’re dealing with, what you have to work with, that sort of thing. As far as I can tell, it’s some sort of mass-extinction event which just happened to… miss us, and not leave any bodies.”

“Could it be Project Insight?”

“If it was, it backfired pretty badly,” Natasha says. “I don’t think there’s anyone left from HYDRA, either.”

Steve breathes through the headache he can feel building between his eyes. “Right. Okay, so not HYDRA, but someone else- Loki?” Natasha’s hand stills for a second, and Steve continues,“If he came back, wanted revenge-“

“Would it matter?” Natasha doesn’t snap. She doesn’t raise her eyes from the screen, or look more than mildly puzzled, which is how he knows that she’s going for the throat: Natasha is very precise with her anger. “What do you really want to know, Rogers, why everyone else disappeared or why you survived again?”

“It’d matter,” Steve says. “If we can save them. If we can- make Loki undo this, or… Avenge them. That’s what we said we’d do, isn’t it?”

Natasha presses her teeth into her lip, which flushes pink. “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s not in the three-stage plan.”

Which isn't actually a ‘no’.

~

The other stages, Natasha goes on to inform him, are called Regroup – find other SHIELD agents, other friendlies, anyone who isn’t trying to kill you, and work together to get as many people to safety as quickly as you can, which he seems to have accomplished almost by accident – and Rebuild, which only makes Natasha roll her eyes when he asks how they start.

“That’s SHIELD code. Stands for ‘get drunk and go to Disneyland.’”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It’s not,” she admits with a sigh. “But it sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?”

By the time they take a break for lunch, their three-stage plan has six different stages, but it feels like a start.

~

He ignores Natasha’s protests that someone should stay in the hospital and joins her tour of the city as soon as he can. He straps the shield onto his back, where the bruises have already vanished, and walks through the streets. All of them are empty.

It isn’t how he imagined it. Maybe if they had left their corpses behind. Maybe if there was something to prove that Sam and the others were really gone, instead of just not with them right now.

It doesn’t feel sad, being alone in the world. It feels like the city is waiting for something.

~

He turns a corner and Natasha isn’t beside him, and Steve’s chest does the same awful lurch it did on the train when Bucky fell. He’s unhooking the shield before he even realises, ignoring the pain which shoots through his injured arm, and he runs back along the street calling her name.

She looks up – and oh, god, she’s still there, still with him, and the sudden wave of relief is almost enough to knock him to the floor – and her mouth twitches, just a little, like she’s thinking about laughing.

“You good?” she says, and the only thing which stops him from losing his temper is the way her eyes are shining.

Natasha’s holding a cell phone too, he sees, and when he gets close enough he can read the name of her contact: Melissa Hughes. He can just about hear the tinny automated voice reading from a script he knows by heart, ‘The number you have dialled is not in service. Please check the number and try again.’

(“You weren’t my first call,” Natasha admits later. “I was already on my way when Sam told me you woke up, but then everything happened- I tried Maria, Nick, everyone I thought could help.”

“But nobody could?”

“Well. I did get hold of Captain America in the end.”)

He rubs at his arm and asks Natasha to strap the shield into place while he calms down. There’s a very quiet sniff behind his back, which he pretends not to have heard, and then he feels Natasha’s hands down his spine, snapping fastenings into place, testing the give. They feel so warm.

~

They pick up two bicycles from the sidewalk and pedal through the stalled traffic, one long circuit up to the edge of the river and back again. Steve offers to keep cycling across the bridge, to see how long it would take for them to find someone else, but Natasha refuses.

“It is just us, isn’t it,” he says. “I thought it couldn’t be, but-“ A whole week, and nothing.

“I hope not,” Natasha says. Then, “Sorry.”

Steve rests his feet flat on the road but doesn’t dismount, and reaches down to feel the outline of his cell phone in his pocket. They’ve been transmitting both their cell numbers for the past two days; if anyone out there is still looking, they’ll be able to reach them.

When he turns around, Natasha’s standing before him. Her bike is lying on its side behind her, and she’s still with the nervous kind of energy he hasn’t seen on her since he threw her into the air at an alien spaceship.

“Natasha?”

“Don’t,” she mutters, and then she rises up onto her tiptoes, holding onto his shoulder for balance, and pushes her mouth into his. It takes Steve a moment to realise he’s being kissed.

It’s nothing like the last time. Natasha’s tugging at the collar of his shirt, trying to pull him down so that he’s on her level, and the handlebars of the bike are pressing into his stomach every time she does. Steve’s hands go to her waist and she huffs in impatience, drags them away so she can pull her jacket off and drop it to the ground.

(If—)

After a moment, Steve lets the bike fall.

~

When Natasha finishes, she ducks her head into the side of his neck and breathes. He runs his fingers up the damp skin of her back, and when he pulls them away, they shine.

He wonders who it is Natasha’s missing. Whether it’s easier for him, having lost everyone once before, to do it again now.

They don’t talk about it.

~

“So,” Natasha says. “Asgard.”

“You think Loki did this?”

“Maybe. Maybe they know what did.”

If Thor could tell them anything, Steve thinks privately, then he would have already done so; he wouldn’t let them carry on like this. But Natasha looks if not happier, then at least more excited about the prospect of smacking Loki around, and it’s a vast improvement on where she was.

“How do you plan on asking them?”

Natasha’s grin is sharp and full of teeth. “I’m thinking we knock.”

~

Every recorded incident of Asgardian contact began with the Bifrost opening from their side, but one of them didn’t finish that way. Dr Jane Foster opened the Bifrost from this end in New Mexico; and if they’re lucky, they’ll be able to do the same from her work.

~

Natasha gathers everything they’ll need, rejuvenated by the promise of something to do, and Steve sends another transmission across the airwaves. This time, he tells anyone who’s still listening, this time, there’s hope.

(It doesn’t feel like a lie.)

~

When they hit open road, they help themselves to cars, trucks, and a glorious stretch through Germany is on the back of a motorcycle, Steve steering while Natasha clings to his back, her arms looped around his shield.

They take food wherever they come across it; after a while, Steve stops leaving euros everywhere and saves them for when they come to places which look like they need the money.

“Admit it,” Natasha shouts into his ear one evening as they’re cruising along the autobahn. “This is kinda fun.”

“The best,” Steve calls back, and Natasha starts to laugh.

~

Every night before he goes to sleep, Steve flicks through his list of contacts, counting them the way some people count sheep. He doesn’t want to forget. He doesn’t want to forget any of it.

(The last thing he ever said to Sam was to leave him alone. That part, he gets to remember in Technicolor.)

~

Every time they stop for the night, Steve makes sure to charge his cell phone and gets Natasha to do the same. Nobody calls.

One night, while he’s watching Natasha pull her clothes back on, Steve rolls over onto his side and meets her eyes. She doesn’t look away. If there’s nobody in the world left but her. If there’s nobody else he’ll ever see again.

“What if it’s not Asgardians?” he asks instead.

Natasha pulls on a t-shirt she stole from someone’s clothesline. The blue cotton is soft, and starting to wear through in places where someone else’s body had rubbed up against it; he wants to pull it off her.

“If it was anyone else in the world with me right now,” she says, her voice dropping into a whisper instinctively. Whispering comes naturally to people like Natasha. “Anyone at all, you know what I’d be starting to wonder?”

“I can guess,” Steve says; he lit a candle in the Saint Sophia Cathedral, just in case.

“But here you are,” Natasha says, and opens her hands: _Hey presto_ , a magic trick. She draws her knees up to her chest and hugs them loosely, an awkward comma, and Steve’s hand itches to unfold her.

“We’ll get to New Mexico,” he says. “We can find Dr Foster’s research, make it work. Thor’ll help us. After everything his brother did…”

“This your version of a pep talk, Rogers?” Natasha says. She lays down beside him, not quite touching but near enough that he can feel the heat of her skin.

“Looked like you needed one.”

“I’m good,” she says, and stifles a yawn. “But next time, we go to Disneyland first.”

And Steve rolls onto his back and adjusts the bundle of clothes he’s using for a pillow. “It’s a deal,” he says, and he’s still smiling as he falls asleep.

~

It’s been fourteen days since the world ended, and Steve wakes alone. There's an empty sleeping bag next to his, and it takes him a moment to remember why.


End file.
